Best First Hours

metroid

We've all grown up among an onslaught of advertisements. It is almost impossible to look anywhere in a semi-urban place and not see some sort of ad. Television has perhaps been their most successful medium, and video games have been advertising on the same tube we play them on for as long as they have been around.

So to celebrate the hundreds of video game ads, we present the Top 10 Video Game Commercials of All Time. This is the definitive list, carefully developed by our writers and then culled down by Greg and Nate. Blood was shed and tears were wept as we narrowed our "short list" of 25 ads down to just these 10. Without intention, we managed to select a set of ads that not only cover over 20 years of gaming from Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and the PC, but a wide variety of types of ads, from live action re-enactments to comedy to musicals.

This is the first official "list" we've ever posted, and we promise more in the future. They may seem easy to make, but we spent hours putting this together and had a ton of fun doing it.

On the first of the year, the writers here presented their predictions for 2010 in the video game industry. It was our first attempt at anything like this, and since we're primarily gamers first, writers second, and industry experts in a distant last, this was definitely more of an exercise in fun forecasting than put-your-money-down-now predictions.

Well, we can't let bad predictions go forgotten and made fun of, so here we are again. We'll quickly cover what went randomly right and what went horribly wrong, but then we'll be back again on Friday for our fourth annual Game of the Year Awards.

Metroid has never been one of Nintendo's big money-makers, but that
hasn't stopped the franchise from garnering some very devoted fans. It's
not uncommon to see Super Metroid or Metroid Prime sitting atop the
list of favorites from hardcore gamers, and for good reason. Super
Metroid provided a sprawling, interlacing realm of disquieting alien
dangers and secrets, and Metroid Prime translated that experience into
3D with incredible audio-visual design and some interesting
world-building mechanics built right into the gameplay.

Though
there's certainly a base blueprint from these two trailblazers, no two
Metroid games feel exactly alike. Even so, I've found something to love
in each and every one of them (except for the antiquated debut NES game,
which admittedly I just played for the first time days before Other M's
release). The tension of being hunted in Fusion, the sudden shifts in
power at Zero Mission's final hour, the thousands of text logs scattered
through the Prime series...as far as I'm concerned, it's all great
stuff.

It's only natural that the formula would see some
alterations and evolutions over a quarter of a century, and Metroid:
Other M is the latest and most radical experiment to come out of
Nintendo's R&D labs in quite some time. Featuring third-person 3D
action gameplay and a heavy emphasis on cinematic storytelling, the
curiously-subtitled Other M certainly feels very different from its
predecessors. It seems to take after Metroid Fusion the most, with a bit
of Metroid Prime in there as well, but Other M's additions and
adaptations certainly make it feel distinct, for better or worse.

I was first introduced to Samus Aran through her appearance in the Super Smash Bros. fighting game in 1999. As Smash is a melee-centric brawl, I always imagined Samus as an agile and powerful close-combat fighter who happened to have an arm cannon as well. In 2002, I eventually played Super Metroid and Metroid Prime, and discovered that Samus, both in 2D and 3D, fought primarily with her many energy-based weapons. I certainly enjoyed each of the games, but still yearned to see the hulking heroine kick some ass in a more literal sense.

To everyone's surprise, Nintendo ended their E3 2009 presentation with a trailer of the next Metroid game. Created through a collaborative effort between Nintendo's internal studios and Team Ninja of Ninja Gaiden fame, this Metroid: Other M featured Samus Aran's return to third-person adventuring after many years spent behind the visor. Jaws were dropped, however, when the bounty-hunting babe began tossing her foes around like rag dolls, grabbing them in choke-holds, and firing charged beam shots right into their faces. Could this be the Metroid Gaiden I had been waiting for?

The months that led to Other M's release at the end of August tempered my expectations somewhat as new details were revealed, but I was still fairly excited when the game was shipped to my door earlier this week. Did my first romp with Other M leave me disappointed or eager to see more?

Way back in May of 1992 for my eighth birthday, my cousins presented me with a subscription Nintendo Power. I had never received anything as cool as my own magazine in the mail before, so when the June '92 issue arrived a few days later I was in heaven. It would be another two years until I bought my own Super Nintendo, but my NES and new Nintendo Power subscription were enough for me.

I kicked off my new Magazine Nostalgia section a few weeks back with my own appearance in Nintendo Power #85, but I have a ton more to discuss. I recently semi-organized all my video game magazines of which I have hundreds, spanning from Nintendo Power, EGM, Game Players, and more. I know I won't ever be able to discuss them all, but I'd like to pretend to try, so why not cover the first one I ever owned?

Do you have any interesting magazine stories? Let us know in the comments section!

I'd like to apologize for being so wordy this week at the First Hour, but the writers here love to write! I recently asked Ian to tell me about his gaming history, thinking I'd get a couple line reponse about how his parents bought him a Game Boy or something, but along comes a serious epic that will probably seem very familiar to many of us reading along.

If you've got your own story you'd like to tell, reply in the comments or send me an email, I'd love to host it here!

You know the scenes I'm talking about. These are the kind of scenes that you have a save file just moments before so you can replay them over and over. These are the scenes you invite your friends over to see so you can show off your system in all its technical glory; the scenes that surpass mere nostalgia and still to this day retain legendary status in the gaming community. These are some of my favorite impacting scenes in gaming history. What are yours?

Going to try something new this year, we're going to make some completely wild predictions that may have little base in reality. I think they're pretty self-explanatory, and hopefully at the end of the year I'll remember we did this and we can have a good laugh at how wrong we were (or be shocked at how right).

So while these are guaranteed to be wrong, they are my current feelings about the industry from hopefully a non-biased gamer's point of view. Well, non-biased until it comes to BioWare games that is.